The protection of buried assets and facilities, such as fiber optic cables, electrical power lines, water mains, etc, is of paramount concern to communication and utility companies. In order to prevent the risk of damaging underground assets and facilities, communications and utility companies actively encourage anyone involved in excavation projects to notify the companies prior to digging into the ground. Services, such as the national and regional “Call Before You Dig” organizations and the “811” telephone number, have been created to centralize the response to such calls and notify the interested companies of the planned excavation. Several thousand notifications may be received on a given day and “dig location tickets” are created to track the status of each of the notifications. The ticket is typically a record within a database containing information such as the identity of the caller, a date the notification was received, a planned excavation date, an estimated location of the excavation, etc. Since each of the numerous tickets may indicate a potentially damaging excavation activity, companies typically use a geocoding system to assist with the processing of the tickets.
Geocoding is the process of converting textual data into a physical location. The most common from of geocoding conversion is translating a street address into geographic coordinates expressed in latitude and longitude values. Through the use of the geographic coordinates, the textual data (e.g., street address) may be mapped and entered onto a geographical information system (“GIS”). A GIS is a system for collecting, storing, analyzing, and managing data and attributes related to spatial and geographic data, or location information. GIS systems may manage large databases of location information, wherein the databases are maintained through continuously adding new location information and updating existing location information. Specifically, a computer system utilizing a GIS capable of integrating, storing, editing, analyzing, sharing and displaying geographically referenced information.
Geocoding is a large industry, having many vendors selling datasets costing over $100,000. Furthermore, many corporations base multi-million dollar decisions on the accuracy of the datasets. However errors occurring in the geocoding process create positional discrepancies. The errors include errors inherent in the data itself as well as quantization errors resulting from the selection of the closest United States Postal Service (“USPS”) address of a desired point. For example, an excavation point may lie within an empty field behind a row of houses. The location of the project may be expressed in the form of a USPS street address of the nearest house. However, the nearest street address may be several dozens of meters away, if not several miles away in the case of a rural location. If a critical business decision is to be made on this project, an error in estimating the location can result in enormous costs, such as the destruction of company assets and utility facilities.